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    802.11g wireless and Dell laptop

    Hey there,

    First of all, I must say the pleasure I had installing Kubuntu Feisty Fawn on my Dell Inspiron 640m
    Almost everything worked out of the box. I simply had to apt-get 915resolution to tune the video settings, but that was so easy...
    I had been trying to get FreeBSD to work on that same machine, and it took me two weeks just to startx...

    So you guys at (K)Ubuntu are doing a great job.

    Now I have a problem : when I ordered my laptop, I wasn't sure that I would use an open-source OS, so I didn't check the compatibility of the wireless card. I picked the "Dell Wireless 1500 draft 802.11n" (pci id : 14e4:4328).
    That was not very smart...

    The lspci output for the card
    Code:
    0c:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation Unknown device 4328 (rev 01)
    	Subsystem: Dell Unknown device 0009
    	Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 4
    	Memory at efdfc000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
    	Memory at e0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=1M]
    	Capabilities: <access denied>
    After reading the forums and all, and trying both bcm43xx-fwcutter as advised on http://market.inattendu.org/article.php3?id_article=49 (french), and ndiswrapper with the driver from Dell website (r151520), I reckon this card is a piece of ... (I should have read "draft" as a hint...)

    Here come the questions :

    1. Has anyone tried this card and made it work (under Ubuntu FF) ? Maybe I'm not using the right driver, or there's something I should check before ndis, or whatever... On Dell laptops, there's something about turning the wifi device on, though I don't remember doing such thing... (The "Fn"+"F2" key that's supposed to do the trick, actually turns BlueTooth on and off)

    2. I read on Ubuntu WiFI/ndiswrapper docs that it wouldn't work with a Desktop CD install - should I try with the alternate CD (I have some idea on what the answer might be ;-))

    3. If I go for changing my card, what model would you advise me ? And will I have to take the current card off my computer ? This is my first laptop.


    Well, thank you very much anyway for this beautiful system. I've tried several Linux (and even FreeBSD as I said) on different boxes but I often had to give up because I could not setup all the hardware correctly, and here you come with this wonderful Kubuntu. I'm really amazed.

    Thanks for your answers...

    E. Mie

    #2
    Re: 802.11g wireless and Dell laptop

    Wohow, pretty quiet here ;-)

    It seems my card is not and will not be supported (nasty Broadcom chipset).

    So I'm about ready to get a new one.
    The question is : which one ?

    According to the list found at http://linux-wless.passys.nl/ there is no 802.11g PCMCIA card supported.

    Had I better go for a mini-PCI card ? (my PC is a Dell Inspiron 640m)
    Which one ?

    Please let me benefit from your knowledge and wisdom !!

    Cheers,
    E.Mie

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